The present invention relates to an automatic performing apparatus of an electronic musical instrument which reads out performance information stored on an appropriate recording medium and generates tone signals according to the performance information.
An automatic performing apparatus of this type is provided with a memory to store performance information read out of the recording medium. The memory successively stores musical note data including pitch data and duration data with progression of a melody. And note data are successively read out of the memory at time intervals corresponding to note durations, and musical tone signals having pitches corresponding to the pitch data read out are formed. Such an automatic performing apparatus may be provided with an auto rhythm playing device, and the note duration is measured by a tempo clock signal used for rhythm generation. An example of such apparatus is disclosed in our copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 217,896 filed on Dec. 18, 1980, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,364,299, and assigned to the same assignee as the present application. Such a prior automatic performing apparatus is designed only for automatically generating a musical note signal corresponding to each melody note. It is desirable, however, that tone colors of generated tone signals and/or modulation effects such as vibrato or tremolo, that is, generation modes of tone signals, can be set automatically and also intentionally by a player. It is also desirable that rhythm patterns, start control, tempo control in an automatic rhythm performance be selected automatically and manually.
A performance by the automatic performing apparatus is naturally used as an exemplary one for a novice player. Therefore, from this aspect too, the generation mode of the automatically performed musical tones is desirable to be adjusted manually so that variations of the generation mode of musical tones can be acknowledged by the novice player.